Pages

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Back to Square One

I have some huge crazy good news. I finished The Curse of Betrayal yesterday. I wrote the book during Camp NaNoWriMo and although it is nowhere near done I'm ecstatic. I wrote this novel differently than I did the first one-the main reason being the outline was set and I didn't have much leeway.

What changed?

My first book I was able to write just based of my stream of consciousness. What I thought I wrote and I didn't care plot holes or if the story went in different directions because it was the first book and all the others could follow.

This novel, I had to start at a certain point and end at a certain point since it's the middle child in the series. I faced some problems when I really wasn't feeling a scene but couldn't skip or change it. It was frustrating at times because I wanted to write and write and write like I did with the first one.

I had to change up my style, my pace and basically everything. Instead of writing on one document and splitting it up later, I wrote by scenes. I kept my writing short yet long enough to get my point across. The finished novel is around 55,000 words but my target word count is about 80,000-90,000 like my first book.

Where to now?

BACK TO SQUARE ONE. Chapter one, word one, sentence one and all of that. I have to go back in, read through, make the scenes cohesive and blend it all together. I also want to add in some fun scenes and character building parts.

I'm dreading doing this all over again but at the same time, I've learned a lot from my first mistakes. I've learned the best editing techniques, I have a great editor that I already know is a match for me. I really hope this is a breeze.

News update: Avery Hutchings, my designer and I sat down on Thursday to work on my cover and we've decided to go a completely different route for the books. She's drawing them instead of using pictures. To be honest, I'm tired of looking at books with a guy's abs or a beautiful girl. I want my book to stand out and our cover is definitely going to ROCK!

Don't forget tomorrow is Writing Wednesday! Subscribe to the site to get the latest posts.